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Stoobalou writes "The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That's the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won't be halted by 'three strikes' broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA. The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is 'better described as a global pricing problem' — and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares."

I remember paying £10 for a CD album years ten back, and now I can get a new album as an MP3 download at 320kbps from Amazon for £9 or less. That's not even allowing for inflation. Prices are low enough. The cost of a song or a movie or, as we're discussing in this topic, a computer game, isn't the price of the cheap CD and cheap box it comes in. That's just a medium. The cost of producing a computer game remains the same.

Their markets have expanded greatly, the cost of equipment for production has dropped, their cost of distribution has dropped through the floor to almost nothing and wow the price has dropped all the way from 10 to.... 9. huh...

You're comparing the cost of a physical product you can sell to a small collection of bytes? They are hardly the same.

They are to me and to most people. If I have to go to the shop to buy a CD, or if I pay to buy a pile of 320kpbs MP3s on Amazon, my ears don't care! It's the same music and I enjoy it the same way at the same times and places. The product is indeed the same, merely buying MP3 downloads is a more convenient method of delivery.

Yes but the cost of producing a computer game is NOT what the games companies pay to have a game produced.
Once you remove all the marketing, overpriced voice actors, hollywood accounting and crap that gets added on the actual
cost is a lot less.

So if you remove costs, the cost is less? Whilst I'll concede the validity of that statement, the relevance seems a little lacking. If it is your contention that piracy is legitimised b

Netflix streaming is a good example of good pricing vs content offered. TV shows and movies sold on the iTunes Store is a good example of bad pricing. TV Shows in HD should cost 99 cents to own, 50 cents to stream and SD shows should cost 50 cents to own and 25 cents to stream. Movies should be priced at least half if not a quarter of the price for the DVD or BluRay version.

Try selling at it $5.99 and see what happens to the app's piracy rate...

I expect the absolute piracy to stay the same.I expect total legitimate sales to fall through the floor.Thus piracy rate will skyrocket *

Note that "Piracy Rate" (defined here as the ratio of piracy to legit sales will increase dramatically as an artifact of the legitimate sales crashing, not as a result of any increase in actual piracy.

I seriously doubt there is anyone paying for $1 apps that would jailbreak their phone to pirate a $5 o

Don't worry about the people pirating it, just make it the price at which you make the most money even when some do pirate it. If making it $0.50 would convert enough pirates to buyers than do that, if not don't.

Unless you post more information on your game it will be hard to tell but my guess is that people do not think that they their worth of money. Perhaps it just has to be better.

If someone wants to spend time playing a computer game, $0.99 isn't going to put most people off. More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better. If you want a more rigorous logical argument, my time is worth more than $0.99 per hour and so is almost everybody else's. So if I spend an hour on a game, I'm already paying significantly more than $0.99 in real terms. That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.

The problem that I have is that many of us don't WANT to be a pirates, but the studios heavy-handedness and greed make it almost impossible NOT to. I am perfectly happy buying a blu-ray or DVD. But the studios often throw up so many road-blocks to me as a legitimate consumer as to make it impossible.

I DVR "The Color of Money" (one of Scorsese's best, IMHO) in HD and I want to buy a copy that won't disappear the second my DVR dies. But, guess what? The studio says I can't (the only legally available version is a crappy non-anamorphic DVD that looks awful on a modern TV). So I'm left with the option of Pirate Bay or illegally ripping it off my DVR (both of which would make me a pirate in their eyes). I want to buy it legitimately, but the studio says no.

I DVR "Space Race: The Untold Story" [imdb.com] (great docudrama, BTW) in HD from the National Geographic Channel. Same deal, want to buy it. But this time the studio won't even let me buy a DVD in the U.S. (much less an HD blu-ray). It's only available in Region 2. So, even if I import it, I would now be forced to illegally modify my DVD player to watch it. Want to buy it. Want to be honest. Nope, I would have to rip it from my DVR if I wanted to own it.

Even with the blu-rays and DVD's I *can* buy, I'm stuck watching 5 or 6 forced trailers at the beginning of each (many studios not even letting me skip them). Don't want to spend several minutes fighting with your player just to watch the goddamn movie you paid for? Better go off to Pirate Bay, because that's the only way you're getting it, buddy.

To Sony, Warner, Paramount, et. al.: Stop forcing people to be pirates with your fucking DRM, your greed, your region coding, your goddamn bizarre distribution rights agreements, etc. and you'll find there are a LOT more people willing to actually pay for your stuff than you think.

Dude, if you don't own a region free player (which are certainly not illegal to produce/sell/import/buy and all the big manufacturers make them), you're a n00b. Further it's not illegal to change your DVD player's region code.

The online shops selling region-free DVD players seem pretty shady to me. I'm looking for a good quality region free Blu-Ray player. Preferably with an eject button on the remote, but all the shops just skeeve me out.

Agreed with that. I've seen ads in DVDs for rent. I thought... well, ok, it's a rental, I'm only gonna watch it once so i don't care.

Then my dad bought a DVD of a Rolling Stones concert. Guess what? The moment you start it, a 1-minute ad starts playing. You can't skip it. What the hell? If I PAY for something, I don't want to be forced to watch an ad! If it's a (paper) magazine I can skip the pages, but this is way too much.

Whilst your case may be true, the problem is that arguments about DRM, format availability, ease of downloading vs. having to go to a shop and buy... All these such arguments were made extensively as rationalisations of piracy early on. And yet most of these are dealt with now. I can buy a computer game as a direct download. I can buy high-quality MP3s at the click of a button. Things like wanting The Colour of Money in HD are edge cases these days, and getting fewer all the time. They're not good argument

I have a better solution to this exact problem. My wife and I just stopped buying dvd's and such. If the studios and artists involved don't -want- me to see their work, then I don't go out of my way to see it. If they wanted us to see it they would make it available to see in a useful fashion.

We're avid movie goers... or at least used to be. But we went from buying a number of dvd's/blu-ray's every month, as well as going to movies to not doing either.We're not pirating the content, we simply decided it was becoming too much hassle and -replaced- that entertainment with other things.

Now we're not straight up boycotting hollywood as a family, but unless something is available how we want it, where we want it, when -we- want it, for an affordable price, we just pass it up. There's nothing hollywood or the record companies produce that I truly feel like I'm missing out by not having access to it. It's entertainment, that's all. Now on the flip side, the studios -SHOULD- want to make it available to us, the consumer, however we decide we want to have access, because while it's just simply entertainment to us, it is THEIR jobs and the food on THEIR plates as an industry that fails if they decide to stop providing content in a fashion that allows them to even have customers.

So next time you think about pirating something, remember, no one is forcing you to pirate anything. On the contrary, no one is forcing you to give a shit about the studios content at all.

The problem that I have is that many of us don't WANT to be a pirates, but the studios heavy-handedness and greed make it almost impossible NOT to. I am perfectly happy buying a blu-ray or DVD. But the studios often throw up so many road-blocks to me as a legitimate consumer as to make it impossible.

I DVR "The Color of Money" (one of Scorsese's best, IMHO) in HD and I want to buy a copy that won't disappear the second my DVR dies. But, guess what? The studio says I can't (the only legally available version is a crappy non-anamorphic DVD that looks awful on a modern TV). So I'm left with the option of Pirate Bay or illegally ripping it off my DVR (both of which would make me a pirate in their eyes). I want to buy it legitimately, but the studio says no.

I DVR "Space Race: The Untold Story" [imdb.com] (great docudrama, BTW) in HD from the National Geographic Channel. Same deal, want to buy it. But this time the studio won't even let me buy a DVD in the U.S. (much less an HD blu-ray). It's only available in Region 2. So, even if I import it, I would now be forced to illegally modify my DVD player to watch it. Want to buy it. Want to be honest. Nope, I would have to rip it from my DVR if I wanted to own it.

Even with the blu-rays and DVD's I *can* buy, I'm stuck watching 5 or 6 forced trailers at the beginning of each (many studios not even letting me skip them). Don't want to spend several minutes fighting with your player just to watch the goddamn movie you paid for? Better go off to Pirate Bay, because that's the only way you're getting it, buddy.

To Sony, Warner, Paramount, et. al.: Stop forcing people to be pirates with your fucking DRM, your greed, your region coding, your goddamn bizarre distribution rights agreements, etc. and you'll find there are a LOT more people willing to actually pay for your stuff than you think.

While I understand what your saying, the problem i find is, why feel bad?

The companies that make the shows you like, don't care about you. They do NOT care what you want, all they want is money.

If they are NOT smart enough to make it available in formats you want, then screw them. Don't feel bad. It's their loss.

You can, of course, write them and let them know that because they don't offer the quality of the show that you want, your forced to get it other ways. Which is money they just lost in sales,

I use the "fast play" button on my sony unit. It zips through the trailers at double speed. Might want to try that next time you play a Disc?

But why should you have to do this on something you own? If I wanted to watch those commercials, I would click on them from the menu. I should be forced to find the fast forward button. The studios are simply using it as another revenue stream, getting themselves advertising $$$ for including that non-skippable commercial on their DVD/Blueray that they are selling, and they certainly are not passing along that discount to the consumers.

Things are much more expensive, in USD, outside USA. A Playstation 3 costs USD 800 down here in Argentina. Games are priced at over $100. It's not about taxes either. The rationale is this: "People are going to pirate. We don't have a chance to sell to middle and lower classes, only higher classes. And we can charge a lot more if we market it as a 'luxury' item".

Plenty of businesses pay for RHEL, despite it being "free". Support, peace-of-mind, and ease are all worth cash over the absolutely free DIY alternative.

There's a reason strictly multiplayer games like WoW are hardly pirated: you're paying for the experience (AKA the servers you play on) not the disc. It's also why Netflix and other a la carte services are so popular: paying for the convenience and peace-of-mind knowing that if you want a movie, you can just get it. Sure there will always be a minority that

Pirated software has an opportunity cost. When the legit cost of your app is cheaper than the time opportunity cost of finding the pirated version, you will make a sale to all but the stupidest of pirates.

Pirated software is free. There is no way to compete with that at any price.

Yet plenty of games, music, and movies have been quite successful despite pirated copies being available before the official release.

Face facts: People are willing to pay for stuff. If we were the big stingy tight asses these industries all thought we were, Starbucks would never have been a massive success and iTunes would simply be a bit of trivia only Slashdotters would be aware of.

if you charge a fair price for the product (which is fair for the market concerned), make the product easily accessible to people who want it, AND DON'T TREAT THEM LIKE CRIMINALS most people will be happy to pay for your product. The ones who don't want to pay even then? You really weren't going to make any money off of them anyway.

How many times do we have to go over this? With theft, you're removing something from the owner so he/she no longer has that item - that's never an issue with copyright infringement.

They are two entirely different violations of the law, just as arson and cannibalism are two entirely different violations of the law. You can try and tie yourself up in a pretzel trying to say that oranges are just like apples, but it just doesn't work. And please, pretzels, skip all the usual straw men - copyright infringement is still a violation of the law and no one is claiming otherwise.

Actually, it's industry and busybody shills like yourself that is "insisting on broadening" the definition. Theft has meant one thing for centuries, and because it carries more negative weight in people's minds than 'copyright violation', it is being used incorrectly for emotional manipulation. That is in itself a shameful thing, which is why you post as AC when supporting such disingenuous behavior.

Individual songs are so cheap on iTunes I never pirate music and I'm extremely happy to pay. If I could get e-book rentals for two weeks, movie rentals a week, and episodes at the same time as they air in the USA for $1 I've give them even more of my money! Buying movies in iTunes for $5, and being able to buy them at the same time as they come out in the cinema for around $10 would be great too.

I've been watching "Louise" (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1492966/ [imdb.com] or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_(TV_series) [wikipedia.org] ) on Netflix recently. Last night I went to Netflix, and tried to cue up the next episode. Instead of getting to watch episode 10 like I had episode 1 through episode 9, it was only available on DVD, and the DVD wasn't released yet. Some time in the last week or two, they changed.
So, I could either put the DVD for a season I had almost finished watching on my "Save" list, or I could go l

The reality is, this is pure bullshit. For decades pirates claimed they need only lower prices and it would be the end of piracy. And so, we can how the sub-$0.99 cent music market and piracy is still raging; if not growing. The simple truth is, far too many studies, not to mention history which completely invalidates this study before it was written, proves price is almost never (only for a tiny minority is price) a significant factor in piracy.

Thanks for that load of ad hominem crap to cover up the fact that you can't meet the challenge and name a study not funded by industry that demonstrates any of your claims. You're just a gasbag who gets off on insults. Bring facts instead of baseless claims.

the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares

... or add more value. Make the box something customers want, use e-ink displays on something included in the package. Stuff a Tee shirt or roll a poster in there. Add more digital content (games, featurettes, etc) since the file-sharing content tends to be just the bare product. Add a raffle ticket to each purchase that could win some one-of-a-kind memorabilia or else a signed picture.

This isn't hard, nor is it novel. The cost of this media has stayed reasonably steady while its perceived value has dropped considerably. I haven't downloaded a movie in the past 5+ years, yet I've stopped buying them new. Five years ago, I'd buy a used movie for $10 as long as it had some featurettes. Now, my threshold is probably $7, which is four dollars less than five years ago (when adjusting for inflation). I bought In Rainbows [slashdot.org] for $5 and the Humble Indie Bundle [slashdot.org] for $20.

Reducing prices makes a big difference in how the consumer perceives what they bought. It is actually rare to have a company succeed by increasing prices by distorting the value of their product (for example, Apple). The music industry for example has super high prices and those prices have been extremely high forever. Even at $10.00 per CD the prices is outrageous.

Lately I've heard about how some book and program authors have made significantly more money selling their products at $.99 than even at $2.99. Sometimes the income has risen dramatically. The problem with the music industry is that they want to keep their old business model and sell at the same price thus keeping themselves living as billionaires. The consumer on the other hand has said "definitely no" to those prices. Music stores have gone out of business and the sales emphasis is really focused on digital online sales. But the music industry keeps pushing the numbers because they think they'll make even more if they box us into their old price structure.

The internet changes one significant variable. That is distribution. The internet gives everyone a chance to open their own stores online. Buy what you need JIT and resell. You do the shipping and maintain a minimal workforce. Contrast that with what the music industry wants--to control distribution. In controlling that channel they can determine the prices, even going so far as having the RIAA member companies fix the prices. The internet widely opens almost every market to anyone. Getting your target audience's attention or even growing your target audience is vastly simplified. This is far different than it was even 30 years ago.

The consumer knows it costs less to produce digital works and to distribute them, therefore there's no need to keep paying the high price, so they download the music for free instead of caving in to the music industry's demands. What the music industry doesn't understand is that the ability to get the attention of more people and to let them sample the music is vastly increased via the internet. That means they can continue to grow their businesses with digital sales at significantly lower prices because of that access.

So, to me, the basic premise of price reduction is spot on. Dunce-heads in various industries affected by free digital downloads are killing their own business and giving away the market to others to control (i.e., Apple, Amazon, etc.) To those dunce-heads: lower your prices because we the consumer know that your costs are significantly reduced and your access to the consumer is vastly expanded. And, while you are at it, go back and give those artists what they deserve and stop stealing from them.

It's naive to think it's the only way, or to think it will actually stop it.

It will reduce piracy, at least among groups that are motivated to pirate based on the price barrier, but that's not the only type of group.

From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:

- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked.- People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious.- People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy.- People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.

This is what I've figured, and I have mixed feelings about it. As a consumer, of course I'm all in favor of lower prices. But as someone who hopes to create stories and art and software and other things, and to do that for a living, it's depressing. The Big Media represented by the RIAA and MPAA and a dozen or so novelists may be getting money for nothing and chicks for free, and there's the occasional two-guys-and-a-dot-com success story, but most independent creators (in various media) are already stru

Back when recording sales had to support factories to churn out discs or tapes, and the trucks and brick and mortar stores to distribute them, one could argue that music should have cost more than it should now because none of that stuff is needed any more. But has the pricing changed? No- music downloads cost about the same as the same music would have cost back when it was supporting all that expensive infrastructure. Now add in the fact that most music is

How bout limiting the bandwidth between residentially leased subnets, and only offering full bandwidth to legitimate commercially owned networks? That would go a long way toward preventing piracy the way it is implemented these days (e.g. Bit Torrent, and other p2p protocols).

I should maybe make that a bit clearer... throttle the bandwidth of a residential connection connecting to another residential host. Remove the throttling when the residential connection connects to a commercial host.

Note: I do not defend or condone piracy. I think it's generally wrong, but I do understand why it exists;

I think it's also a matter of accessibility.

1. There is simply no legal alternative to Torrent-sites with the same range of content, at the same "same-site"-convenience and instant gratification of a download. Nomatter what price the consumer is willing to pay.2. For anyone interested in video-content, compatibility with the media-center is key. Due to various DRM-mechanisms and special-delivery-methods

The study deals with "pricing problems" in emerging global economies. If the contention is that in such economies, digital media are priced out of the market, well and good. Reduce your prices, you will probably see an uptick in sales.

But isn't it a common Slashdot rejoinder, whenever someone claims to have "lost a sale to piracy," that a pirate is someone who would not have purchased your media anyway? You can't have it both ways. I live in the U.S., which I don't think would be considered an "emerging economy" for the purposes of the study. If prices here are at least more proportional to the perceived value of the product than in developing countries, why do Americans still pirate media?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate media do so because their notion of a "pricing problem" is that the product has a price on it, period. Didn't we have a story here a while back indicating that most people who pirate in the U.S. do so because it's a way to get free stuff? Come on--technology provides people with a means to obtain what they want (albeit unlawfully), at no cost to themselves, with no apparent injury to any visible person, and virtually zero likelihood of getting caught. Do we really believe a significant number of the people who avail themselves of that opportunity do so because their acceptable price point is somewhere above nothing?

We can claim that reducing prices may reduce piracy (although, rather like the lost sales claims made by major rights-holders, such claims are difficult to back up with hard data). But pretending that cutting prices will make piracy vanish (or even meaningfully reduce it) is laughable.

Is there a term or concept in English or German that's kind of like the inverse of Shadenfreude? Instead of being happy that misfortune has befallen someone, you are upset that something good has happened to someone else. That seems to be the real problem with the industry and armchair moralists here. They are too busy being Puritans to notice or care if they benefit from the situation.

The authors go out of their way to say that moral condemnation of piracy doesn't make sense but I wonder if that also applies to the moral satisfaction that some people take in "punishing" greedy copyright holders by pirating their stuff? I tend to think that people that get off on giving a middle finger to copyright holders would pirate no matter what the price and therefore their moral self-righteousness is just as much bullshit as the moral indignation of the copyright holders.

There are two ceilings to worry about: The price for which your product is worth it, and the amount of work I have to do to actually access your product.

The first one was my primary concern as a college student. I just plain didn't have the money to buy everything that I'd want to, especially at say a $50-$60 price point for games, and a $20 price point for movies. I did, however, have a lot of time and a fat internet pipe going straight to my room.

The other side, which is more relevant now, is the work I have to do. I can buy enough entertainment at retail prices to keep me busy, so quite frankly, if your game/movie/music requires me to put a bunch of time into getting it to work, I'll move onto the next thing and not give you my money or find a crack, but if the pirates are offering a better product, why go through legit sources? If I literally can't get your product (hello everything stuck in licensing hell), you leave me exactly one option to get your series.

Basically, if you want to make more money, don't make it easier for people to pirate your shit than pay for it. Sure, this may not work for some things (no, I will not give out my credit card to some starving artist using a shady pay service who only wants a buck for his album, I probably won't get it at all at that point), and you'll probably never get college students to pay full price for everything (you can't get blood from a stone), but make it easier for people who work all day and don't want to jump through 8 layers of hoops just to play their fucking game for an hour or two a night.

Discussion in these threads always centers on cost and not value, and value is where the center of the struggle is. How does one determine the value of a copy of an artistic work in a digital format, especially in comparison to ye olden times when buying music meant buying a physical object that couldn't be perfectly, freely and infinitely copied? The industry would like to pretend that the value hasn't changed. Rampant copyright infringement results in some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance on the part of consumers: is this song worth what I paid for it, is it worth more (obviously I wouldn't have paid for it if it was worth less... right?), or is it worth nothing because it doesn't cost anything to make a copy that is as good as the original?

Looking just at my interest in music, I would say that I have downloaded everything ever published that I am likely to ever have interest in. I think the music industry should make their entire catalog available "free for personal use" and collect ad revenue. They could charge a premium for new releases and milk the discount curve until it is moved onto the archive, after say a year. They could still try selling commemorative sets and artist collections; things that make nice gifts. The only problem I see with this model is that they haven't released anything I would pay for in the last three years.

The problem with DRM is that the original is not a "clean copy" by any stretch of the imagination. That's the fundemental problem with DRM. They take the original and screw around with it in some way as to make it less useful to the customer.

Exactly. Amazon figured this out with music but I don't know why everywhere isn't figuring out that DRM doesn't work.

Take any DRM'd TV episode, song, game - whatever. You, the paying customer, have this huge list of things you can't do with it. Can't play it on a different computer. Can't play it on Linux. Can't stream it to your media center in the living room. Hard drive crashed? Sorry - even though you backed up the file there is some stupid keyring system that you didn't backup and it can't be re

You'd be surprised how much better pirated versions of games can be due to buggy or invasive DRM. Even as simple as not needing to put in the DVD each time you want to play the game can be enough drive for someone to download a no CD hack if not outright pirate the game.

"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."

No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.

You seem confused by the term "DRM". It has nothing to do with Apple's app-approval process or their policies requiring a cut of the revenue. Go ahead and complain about those all you want (because you have a good point there), but don't confuse them with DRM.

An example of Apple's DRM are the restrictions on how many devices you can load one of the music files or app bundles onto, and the restrictions on moving files from an iPod to a computer rather than the other way 'round. By allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s. That's what "somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM" means.

What it the mechanism by which the App-Store policies and revenue cuts are enforced? Isn't that DRM? What would you call it?

I'd suggest that their DRM really only works because of the low price of apps. Sure you can get around it, but if it's going to cause you problems in the future--i.e. with further updates--that are going to make you waste time and effort, and you can avoid that waste by spending $0.99, that's what most people are going to do.

I can't cite anything, but I'm absolutely certain that I read somewhere that pirated apps can be easily installed on jailbroken phones.

So a combination of low price and just-annoying-enough DRM is probably the real key.

Point zero zero zero two percent of the population doesn't really constiture "the public". The public simply wants to use the device, not tinker with it any more than the public tears down their car engines for fun.

While a jailbroken iPhone, iPod, or iPad prevents people from using the App store while in broken mode,

No, it doesn't prevent people from using the app store. My iPhone is jailbroken and I use the App store (for both paid and free-as-in-beer free apps. I have exactly zero "pirated"[sic] software on my phone. I use the jailbreak for:

I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?

Price does not really reduce piracy, DRM does. People will pirate if it is easy to do so.

I once had the opportunity to witness the sales of some software bundled with a freshman chemistry textbook. This chemistry visualization and modeling software was needed for class assignments. It was packaged and sold separately from the textbook so other students could use it too. The textbook included a coupon to get the software at a highly discounted price. About US$10 IIRC, US$30 if not bundled. The software co

That is for something that is not optional. I flat out will not buy games that have DRM that will make me jump through hoops. If the DRM means it won't work in Wine I can't play it even if I wanted too.

"Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline."

Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount was because they had already made back all of their money back and then some by that point so they had a greater incentive to cut huge discounts on an older title with flat sales. If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.

Why not?If they get that level of sales for an old game at a low price, imagine the level of sales for a new title at a discount price. What they get per unit really does not matter, there are basically $0 per unit costs. So total income is the only thing that matters.

"Afford" a discount? Did you miss the point that when they lowered prices, profit and revenue went up? It sounds like they can't afford not to do a discount.

Regardless, your post about whether or not they would do that for a new game is not relevant when we're talking about the relationship between price and revenue. The conclusion still shows that lower prices translate to higher revenue, regardless of what you think Valve may or may not do.

Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount was because they had already made back all of their money back and then some by that point so they had a greater incentive to cut huge discounts on an older title with flat sales. If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.

Portal I: 20 bucks, and bundled in Orange Box.

Portal II: 60 bucks.

Yup. If Valve thought they could make more money over the lifetime of Portal II by starting cheap, they would do it. Deep discounting pulls more money in over the "long tail" of a game, but most of a game's income is in the first few months of its release.

This is why publishers apply DRM even though they know that eventually it will be cracked. DRM does not have to hold forever; all it has to do is to hold long enough for the critical fi

I buy virtually no games new anymore. I just wait for Steam holiday sales and buy in bulk then. This Christmas I got enough stuff to EASILY cover my gaming for this year. $50.00 is too much. $30.00 is about the upper mean of what I'll pay anymore and it's usually much lower than that.

I pay for Netflix and Pandora too. I have no issue paying REASONABLE prices for good services. The reason I am canceling cable TV soon is because the service is mediocre and the price is NOT reasonable. The best part is, with t

But even if they would lower prices in US and Europe, with games that pretty much leaves us with "crappy" games like Angry Birds, Farmville and indie games. You just cant have the same story, graphics quality and everything else involved with the big good games. I rather spend $50 and have a great game than small little games for a few dollars.

The real problem is that the copy-write holders are focusing on solving piracy, not managing piracy. They need to remember that their first goal is to make profit (more-or-less tied to revenue) and that one pirated copy doesn't translate to a lost sale.

Retail stores structure things knowing that some percentage of merchandise will be shoplifted. They don't like shop lifters, and take reasonable steps to prevent them. However, they don't go TSA on the customers. Like-wise, a game publisher should focu

When everything costs from $20 to $40 and sometimes more, I tend to be a little careful about what I will spend my money on. Let's say a movie on DVD was $5 and music on CD about $3. Do you think anyone would hesitate to buy on impulse? I wouldn't and lots of people would certainly prefer buying to downloading.

While it may be more true for developing nations, it would still be true here... even moreso. In case you didn't notice, here in the US, there was a financia

Bullshit. in case you ain't heard pal we are in the middle of a jobless recession (or I would argue it is actually the start of a long hard depression, only being softened by the fed printing money like there is no tomorrow) which means most folks out there are in "hoard" mode,trying to keep a little put back in case something goes bad so they are not buying $50 games that much and the difference in price can make a HUGE difference in sales.

I actually think the sales numbers/experiment from Steam/L4D speak more about charging first adopters a premium, then tapering off your pricing as the new hotness factor rolls off, promoting sales later on for basically free. Using that model alone, you can charge less up front, and still taper the prices off and come away with the same net income, just over a longer period.

I would say you come away with more net income. I like many people consider anything sub $10 an impulse buy. I regularly check what steam has on sale at less than $10 will pick up any games that looks decent. At above that price I tend to research more and will consider borrowing said game for the PS3. I buy very few new games and me and my coworkers tend to share them for our PS3s rather than each buying them. For the PS2 I have many more games as I can get those for a more reasonable price.

I think there's more to it than that. Take the case of the "Humble Indie Bundles" - you could set your own price, down to a single cent, and much of it (buyer-determined) went to charity. And yet piracy of those games was not only prevalent, but actually increased during these sales.

This tells me that there is a significant mental barrier between "$0.01" and "$0.00". I do not believe it is the financial cost itself, but the difficulties of buying something online compared to pirating. The hassle of Paypal or credit cards or anything else is, IMO, the primary barrier. What is needed is a fast, zero-pain, minimal-set-up system for buying goods online. When buying the software is as easy as pirating it, piracy will drop.

This is probably why Steam has been successful. Once you've set up purchasing with your account, buying a game is simple - most of it consists of clicking "next" a few times. It's not perfect - it tends to assume you want to buy multiple games at once, making buying a single game more difficult than it should be - and of course there's the DRM issue, but it seems to be doing this better than most.

I occasionally do freelance work, making small game models/levels for random people online. Several times, rather than accept payment via Paypal or anything, I've simply told the client "find a game on my Steam wishlist that's about $10, that's enough payment for me". That's how difficult handling actual money online is - trading a service for a product is actually easier.

Yes, pricing is part of the problem. I haven't bought a game at release-day price since the last big Zelda game came out. I don't mind waiting a few months (or even years) for the price to drop from $50 or $60 to $20. I also haven't bought music anywhere in forever - 8 songs that came out in 1986 are not worth $15, even if it is a magnum opus of heavy metal.

So, really, the pricing is only half the issue. First is the divide between "what the product is worth" and "what the product is priced at", second is the divide between "how easy buying it is" and "how easy pirating it is". Solve those two, and piracy will drop significantly. Not to nothing, of course, but it will drop to reasonable levels.

Good for you. Where I live CD prices have stayed the same. A CD in 1999 would cost you USD 22. Today it costs roughly USD 22. Our income hasn't increased 4x but our money has been devaluated to 1/4 of what it was.

Back in the time, I used to buy my CDs for $10-$12 from USA. Even paying international shipping it was cheaper for me.

That thing you mention doesn't happen in countries where piracy is high. I live in Argentina, and I WISH I could get the matrix trilogy for $9. Or even $50 (the trilogy would cost me $100). I know they don't have $5 bins (except really truly bad crap like a macarena remixes CD).

You can download his books and read them for free. If you like them enough, he will gladly sell you a hard copy. It works so well he's been doing with every new book of his for the last couple of years.